Minnesota’s citizens are some of the most educated in the country, across all age groups. Minnesota ranks second nationally in the number of adults, ages 25-64, with an associate degree or higher. The state’s overall high educational attainment ranking, however, masks severe disparities between racial and ethnic groups. Given that Minnesotans of color are comprising a larger share of the state’s population each year, the state’s changing demographic profile requires the state to begin reducing educational attainment racial gaps, or else the state’s economic future will be threatened.

Living arrangements of older people in Europe and the US have changed considerably in the last decades. The impact of these changes on mental health in later life is not fully understood. Making use of interdisciplinary ageing datasets (the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and the Health and Retirement Study in the US), this thesis aims to evaluate how changes in the way older people live influence depressive symptoms in old age – focusing on two types of living arrangements: intergenerational co-residence and housing tenure. Composed of four empirical chapters, this PhD thesis makes four methodological and substantive contributions to the literature. The first chapter sets the stage for a cross-national comparison of the effect of living arrangements on depression. It assesses the comparability of commonly used depressive symptoms measures in the primary ageing datasets (Euro-D and CES-D scales). The second chapter focuses on the effect of early access to homeownership (before the age of 35) and housing stability on later life depression in the US. The findings suggest that accessing the housing ladder early on in the life course and remaining in that home are associated with both lower levels of depressive symptoms and slower progression of depression in later life. The third empirical chapter investigates the association between changes in housing tenure and depression in later life in the US. Using individual fixedeffects models, this analysis assesses whether within-person changes in housing tenure are associated with within-person changes in depressive symptoms. The analyses show that acquiring a home after 50 brings mental health benefits. The fourth empirical chapter evaluates the effects of intergenerational co-residence in 14 European countries. Using an instrumental variable approach to account for reverse causality, the findings suggest that co-residing with an adult child in the context of the 2008 economic crisis can yield mental health benefits for their parents. Taken together, the results presented in this thesis underscore the importance of living arrangements as key life course determinants of depression in old age.

Like many other waterbodies in the United States, Johnson Creek, a tributary of the Lower Willamette River is water quality limited for bacteria. Escherichia coli (E. coli), a member of the fecal coliform bacteria group, has been found to have a high association with human pathogens and the occurrences of gastrointestinal illnesses in waters used for contact recreation; E. coli is commonly used as an indicator of fecal contamination. In the State of Oregon water contact recreational standards for fecal exposure is assessed by measuring in stream levels of E. coli. Because Johnson Creek is water quality limited for bacteria the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ) developed a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) document to address the re-attainment of water quality standards. ODEQ designated management agencies (DMAs) within the Johnson Creek Watershed to adopt best management practices (BMPs) to meet required bacterial loading conditions called for by the TMDL. In this study the status and trends of E. coli over the last two decades were assessed (1996-2016) by analyzing loading conditions for different flow regimes before and after implementation of the TMDL. In addition, management actions utilized by DMAs within the watershed were observed, the effectiveness of structural BMPs were assessed, and recommendations were made to better evaluate progress towards meeting the TMDL.

Was the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election a riot against machines by democratic means? Throughout history, technological breakthroughs have created new prospects of comfort and prosperity for mankind at large but it has equally left plenty to “vegetate in the backwaters of the stream of progress.” During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure. The result was a series of riots against machines. In similar fashion, the Computer Revolution has caused many workers in middle-income routine jobs to shift into low-income jobs or non-employment. Against this background, we examine if groups in the labor market that have lost to technological change are more likely to opt for radical political change. Pitching automation against a host of alternative explanation-including workers exposure to globalization, immigration, manufacturing decline, etc.-we find robust evidence of a relationship between electoral districts exposure to automation and their share of voters supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election. Additional estimates suggest that the support was particularly high in areas characterized by low-educated males in routine jobs. These findings speak to the general perception that low-skilled male workers in routine jobs have been the prime victims of the Computer Revolution, leading them to rage against machines.

Based on the dual premise that nations need to learn from how immigration issues are handled in other modern democracies, and that adaptation to a new era of refugee and emigration movements is critical to a stable world, Marilyn Hoskin systematically compares the immigration policies of the United States, Britain, Germany, and France as prime examples of the challenges faced in the twenty-first century. Because immigration is a complex phenomenon, Understanding Immigration provides students with a multidisciplinary framework based on the thesis that a nation’s geography, history, economy, and political system define its immigration policy. In the process, it is possible to weigh the influence of such factors as isolation, colonialism, labor imbalances, and tolerance of fringe parties and groups in determining how governments ultimately respond to both routine immigration requests and the more dramatic surges witnessed in both Europe and the United States since 2013.

Of the estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., 1.1 million are chil- dren. Due to differential treatment in the labor market, teenage undocumented immigrants face low returns to schooling. To measure the effect of legal status on the educational choices of Hispanic teenagers, we compare siblings who differ in their legal status due to their birth country. We find teenagers who were born in Mexico are 2.6 percentage points more likely to be out of school than their U.S. born siblings. Alternative explanations, such as differences in prenatal or childhood environment, appear largely unable to explain this result, suggesting that legal status has a significant impact on schooling decisions. Ac- counting for these alternative explanations to the extent possible and using proxies for legal status in U.S. census, we show that being undocumented reduces the number of years of high school by between 0.13 and 0.17 years. Back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that providing legal status increases an undocumented worker’s lifetime wages by $8,455 and his lifetime net government fiscal contribution by $4,257, with estimated aggregate impact across all undocumented Hispanics over 75 years of $20 billion in increased earnings and $9 billion in increased fiscal contribution.

We use the rollout of a large-scale land certification program in Mexico from 1993 to 2006 to study how rural reforms establishing secure property rights determine patterns of migration, relocation of economic activity, and structural transformation. We find that certification leads higher-skilled agricultural labor to migrate, leaving behind economies less concentrated in agriculture, and with no significant change in wages. States' manufacturing capitals see corresponding gains in urban population and agricultural employment. Average wages increase significantly in these manufacturing capitals, suggesting growth and demand effects that outweigh employment competition usually associated with immigration. Sectoral wages only rise significantly in services, indicating that imperfect substitutability of labor is empirically important to understanding structural transformation and internal migration. These results also imply that natives in non-tradeable sectors are the most likely beneficiaries of increased local demand under immigration.

Highly productive U.S. cities are characterized by high housing prices, low housing stock growth, and restrictive land-use regulations (e.g., San Francisco). While new residents would benefit from housing stock growth in cities with highly productive firms, existing residents justify strict local land-use regulations on the grounds of congestion and other costs of further development. This paper assesses the welfare implications of these local regulations for income, congestion, and urban sprawl within a general-equilibrium model with endogenous regulation. In the model, households choose from locations that vary exogenously by productivity and endogenously according to local externalities of congestion and sharing. Existing residents address these externalities by voting for regulations that limit local housing density. In equilibrium, these regulations bind and house prices compensate for differences across locations. Relative to the planner’s optimum, the decentralized model generates spatial misallocation whereby high-productivity locations are settled at too-low densities. The model admits a straightforward calibration based on observed population density, expenditure shares on consumption and local services, and local incomes. Welfare and output would be 1.4% and 2.1% higher, respectively, under the planner’s allocation. Abolishing zoning regulations entirely would increase GDP by 6%, but lower welfare by 5.9% because of greater congestion.

We study the implications of social interactions for financial markets in which investors exhibit different degrees of sophistication and can influence each other's beliefs through their interaction. We show that social interactions can either increase or decrease the likelihood for a financial bubble, depending on whether unsophisticated or sophisticated investors have greater social influence. We also present empirical evidence consistent with the theoretical framework from the recent housing bubble. We find that sociability promotes more conservative demand for housing and more stable real estate prices, particularly when the number of sophisticated residents in an area is high.

This book chapter draws on existing research and data to examine the many inequalities embedded in the planning and operations of urban transportation systems. The chapter is organized around the following four themes: spatial access to opportunities, the transportation expenditure burden, public transit service and finance, and the externalities of transportation infrastructure. It concludes with a discussion of poverty as it relates to transportation policy.

In this supplementary online appendix, I present additional results from both the structural model and the Baily (1978) model. I begin with two appendices relating to the structural analysis: appendix D describes the method of calibration and presents the moments and parameters used, while appendix E presents numerical results from sensitivity analyses. Subsequently, two appendices provide information which is relevant to both models: appendix F provides more detail about the calibration of the tax system, particularly the estimation of the marginal and average tax rates used in the paper, while appendix G summarizes and discusses empirical sources from the various literatures that study effects of UI on job characteristics.

This paper uses Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS) to locate library employment opportunities in Rural Opportunity Zones (ROZ): counties in the state of Kansas that offer student loan repayment and income tax waivers for five years for qualified individuals. Counties are displayed on a QGIS map that includes school district lines, hospitals, public libraries, and population densities. The counties in ROZ are compared using three measures: how many libraries are in the county; the standard of living in the county; and leisure activities that are near or in the county. The rural library opportunities are compared to urban library opportunities in Kansas, to illustrate how comparable the opportunities are at rural and urban libraries, with regard to average annual wages for employees, library use statistics, and collection size. The researcher concluded that many excellent job opportunities exist for library professionals and paraprofessionals in ROZ. The researcher also concluded that QGIS is a helpful and easy-to-use tool for comparing data in a geographical display.

I document a trend of increasing mortality across cohorts of white American women beginning with those born in 1951 and continuing through those born in the early-1960s. This cross-cohort trend of increasing mortality represents a sharp break following at least twenty years of decline, is evident starting at age 35, and persists across older ages. The cohort-based pattern can explain previously documented increases in the mortality rate of 45-54 year old white women since 1999 (Case and Deaton, 2015; Gelman and Auerbach, 2016), as well as increases in the mortality rate of 35-44 year old and 54-59 year old white women starting in 1990 and 2010 respectively. There is suggestive evidence of a similar pattern for white men, but the break is smaller and less uniform across ages. That increased mortality is cohort-specific—and evident at many ages—suggests its causes are as well. The cohorts with elevated mortality are about to enter old age and their depressed health could increase health care spending, depress labor force participation, and impact the solvency of government programs.

This study investigates the long-term relationship between slavery and violence in the USA. Although considerable qualitative evidence suggests that slavery has been a key factor behind the prevalence of violence, especially in Southern USA, there has been no large-N study supporting this claim so far. Using county-level data for the USA, we find that the proportion of slaves in the population in 1860 is associated with significantly higher rates of violent crime in all census years for the period 1970-2000. This relationship is robust to including state fixed effects, controlling for numerous historical and contemporary factors, as well as to instrumenting for slavery using environmental conditions. We consider three channels of transmission between slavery and violent crime: inequality, a culture of violence, and ethnic fractionalization/segregation. Although we find some evidence supporting inequality and culture as a channel, results based on data for the year 2000 suggest that ethnic fractionalization/segregation is the most important mediator.

The Effects of Water Markets: Evidence from the Rio GrandePeter Debaere, University of Virginia Tianshu Li, University of Virginia The Rio Grande water market is one of the oldest water markets in the United States. Employing techniques from the social sciences, we present the first difference-in-difference analysis of the actual impact of water markets on production. We compare from 1954 to 2012 the crop composition in counties in the Rio Grande water market with those in their neighboring control counties before and after the water market was established in 1971. We provide evidence that water markets can facilitate a shift from crops that are on average more to ones that are less water intensive, or, alternatively, from crops that are on average less to ones that are more productive in terms of $ generated per unit of water. In addition, we find that such reallocations are especially prevalent in times of drought. Our findings supports water markets as a tool to manage water more effectively, which is one of the main challenges of an increasingly water-strapped world.

Policymakers subsidizing health insurance often face uncertainty about future market prices. We study the implications of one policy response: linking subsidies to prices, to target a given post-subsidy premium. We show that these price-linked subsidies weaken competition, raising prices for the government and/or consumers. However, price-linking also ties subsidies to health care cost shocks, which may be desirable. Evaluating this tradeoffs empirically using a model estimated with Massachusetts insurance exchange data, we find that price-linking increases prices 1-6%, and much more in less competitive markets. For cost uncertainty reasonable in a mature market, these losses outweigh the benefits of price-linking.

Transportation enables low-income individuals to find and travel to employment. This article analyzes the relationship between access to automobiles and public transit and employment outcomes of low-income households. We use longitudinal survey data from participants in the Welfare to Work Voucher Program, which was conducted in five US metropolitan areas between 1999 and 2005. Multinomial logistic regression shows that baseline access to automobiles has a strong positive relationship to follow-up employment but public transit access and receipt of housing assistance do not. Our findings suggest that enhancing car access will notably improve employment outcomes among very-low-income adults, but other assistance will have, at best, marginal effects.

The Central and Eastern United States has recently experienced a large number of earthquakes that are suspected of being induced by anthropogenic activities. Seismic risk assessment is known to be sensitive to ground motion predictions, so it is important to understand whether the intensity of ground shaking produced by those earthquakes differs relative to motions from comparable natural earthquakes. Unfortunately, due to sparse instrumentation in this area, we have limited recorded strong motion data and thus the question has not been resolved definitively. Here we attempt to address this question using U.S. Geological Survey Did You Feel It? (DYFI) data. Using a large set of DYFI survey responses (each with an inferred Macroseismic Intensity and a corresponding earthquake magnitude and distance), we evaluate differences between responses to natural and induced earthquakes. We find a trend that induced earthquakes produce comparable or possibly larger intensities at close distances to the causal earthquake, but that these intensities attenuate faster than natural earthquakes. This finding is consistent with previous literature on the topic, which infers that this effect may be due to induced earthquakes being shallow but having relatively low stress drops. Further we find that the deviations cannot be explained by underlying factors such as differences in exposed populations, survey response rates, or deviations in responses after a sequence of felt earthquakes. This work lends further credibility to the hypothesis that induced earthquakes are capable of producing strong near-fault ground shaking. Future work will investigate the impact of this phenomenon on seismic risk in the Central and Eastern United States.

The sociology of food consumption has emerged as a robust field with rich empirical material and engaged theorization about taste, omnivorousness, distinction, and practice theory. Nevertheless, there are continuing empirical and conceptual lacunae. Although transnational and rural-to-urban migrants play a crucial role in food businesses in many global cities, they are mostly unaccounted for in the sociology of taste. Taking the American case, in particular based on data from New York City, this article provides reasons for that gap and shows what might be gained if migrants were accounted for in the urban sociology of taste.

Despite economic growth since the recession, the gap between the richest and the poorest segments of the population remains one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary America. This paper uses IR-95/20, IR-80/20, and IR-65/35 ratios to measure the income divides between the richest and the poorest segments in the mid-to-large-sized metropolises of the U.S. Southeast, their variation across ethnicities, and their association with metropolitan level attributes such as diversity, segregation, socio-economic, and other built-environment, and labor characteristics. The income divide ratios serve as the dependent variables whereas principal components along with state-dummy variables serve as the explanatory variables in regressions analyses. The metropolises that are large, diverse, and better educated are the most income-divided whereas those with lower educated people are less divided. Metropolises with larger shares of their labor engaged in primary sectors of economy have higher income divides; this observation also holds true for African Americans and Hispanics. Metropolises that gained in intermixing during 2000–2014 are associated with a lower income divide and vice versa.